The following is a list of bullet-point thoughts I have about The Rings of Power season 2 episode 2, “Where the Stars Are Strange.”
(more…)-
Here is an admittedly long bullet list of some of my thoughts and opinions concerning the first episode of the Rings of Power episode 1, “Elven Kings Under the Sky.” I say “some” because I simply cannot contain them all! Spoilers, of course, abound.
An important disclaimer: I do not hate The Rings of Power. I’m still watching and I am very entertained. I do wish I was more than entertained by it, because it’s inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien. The show is still far and away the best fantasy television series around.
But here I would like to record many of my opinions. And they are only opinions.
(more…) -
What did Sauron look like, really? What’s his deal? Was he ever a flaming eyeball on top of a tower? Probably not. Was he a creepy-as-hell humanoid with nine black fingers when he tortured Gollum? Yes. Was he a big guy in spiky black armor when he fought Gil-galad and Elendil on the slopes of Mt. Doom? Possibly. Was he a friendly Elvish-looking mentor when he was “cozening” the Elf-smiths of Eregion? Almost certainly.
He can, in theory, be all of the above. How about a handsome actor like Charlie Vickers? Or a, ummm, Jack Lowden? Apparently!
(more…) -
A musing on the Lord of the Nazgûl and his misunderstanding of the “no living man” prophecy that made him fatally smug. I think about this every time the topic of the Witch-King comes up, and I don’t see anyone talking about it, so now I have to. It goes something like this. . . .
(more…) -
Amazon’s The Rings of Power series is the Van Helsing of Tolkien adaptations*.
Hear me out! This isn’t a hot take. I’ve thought through the comparison a bit. The 2004 film Van Helsing—starring Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale, and David Wenham—is fun and exciting, has some great visuals and action sequences, loads of brilliant costumes, and worthy music. But as a tribute or adaptation of its literary sources, it’s absurd. If we acknowledge that, and what the film is portraying vs. what it’s not, we can absolutely still enjoy it.
(more…) -
I don’t yet know all of what I’ll write about on this blog. The topics will probably be random, but will invariably lead to speculative fiction, Dungeons & Dragons, Tolkien, writing, publishing, and maybe snippets of real life. But since this is a public site, I don’t think I’ll be talking about the private lives of family and friends.
Today I’m going to talk about gnomes.
(more…) -
I don’t usually talk online about my actual day job. But today I’d like to. Just a tiny bit.
So I’m a senior production editor for Macmillan and I work almost exclusively on books for Tor (i.e. the Tor Publishing Group) and its genre imprints:
(more…)- Tor (sci-fi/fantasy)
- Forge (mystery/thriller/Western)
- Nightfire (horror)
- Tor Teen | Starscape (younger readers)
- Tordotcom (experimental speculative fiction)
- Bramble (romance)
-
Welcome . . . to the Halls of Mandos!
Nahhh! Your fëa didn’t leave your hröa. This is just my new, no-frills WordPress website and blog. Just a place I can hang my hat for now. Err, metaphorically speaking. I’ve got an About page, an Articles page, a Books page, and an FAQ, so far.
One thing I would like to bring up here in my first blog entry is my latest writing endeavour: a bit of “popular scholarship” called The Silmarillion Primer. This is the revised and upgraded version of the Primer that first appeared on Tor.com back in 2017. That online series is still there, but I’ve done so much rerwriting and fixing already that it looks like old crayon drawings by comparison (to me, anyway). They’re very colorful, and I’m still proud of them, but I can’t look at it anymore; I’ll only see the mistakes.
This is the near-finished cover art by
(more…)
illustrator/blacksmith/artist-of-all-trades
David DelaGardelle.
Foreshadowed and Foresung 